STAKES HIGH AT FCC LICENSE AUCTION

The Federal Communications Commission held the nation's first auction for the right to use the public airwaves on Monday, and the opening multimillion-dollar bids - five times higher than analysts had expect ed - drew gasps from the audience.

The auction for 10 nationwide licenses, which are expected to be used for advanced two-way paging services, is expected to continue at least through Tuesday. The auction will end only when each of the 29 companies doing the bidding has either dropped out or won one or more licenses. The limit for any single bidder is three licenses, and based on Monday's action, at least half of the licenses will sell for at least $30 million.

Representatives of the participating companies entered their bids from com puter terminals behind drawn curtains like voters at a polling place. It will not be known which companies submitted which bids until winners are eventually named.

"Everybody is surprised about the amount of money that's showing up," said Mark J. Golden, vice president of the Personal Communications Industry Association, a trade organization for paging companies. "The sky is the limit."

This week's bidding is seen as some thing of a dress rehearsal for auctions to begin late this year for a set of poten tially even more valuable licenses for the next generation of cellular commu nications, known as personal communi cations services, or PCS.

The Clinton administration had estimated that the auctions later this year might bring in $10 billion.

For small companies, women, and minority groups, which were to have been given an edge in the auction by having to pay only 75 percent of the amount of their bid if they won a license, the richness of Monday's action seemed to make the promise of a discount a potentially moot point.